Building an Earth Sheltered Home

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Monthly Archives: July 2010

The weekend started with a trip to Portland to pick up two sets of 3’ X 10’ X 6’ scaffolding (Craigslist find), that the shotcrete operator will need to reach the upper areas of the shell. This also turned out to be really helpful for placing the foam forms on the inside of our shell. The house is really starting to take shape now that we are putting the forms in.

It’s interesting how our house is starting to feel bigger now that it is getting closed in.

By the end of the of the weekend, we had managed to finish the East wing and the first row on the South side. There is still a lot to do before we can spray the shell but the sense of progress is rewarding.

Great excitement this weekend as we started to put up the interior foam forms. We will be using lots of lath boards to secure the foam to the shell so that the concrete doesn’t blow through. The local building supply store only had bundles of 4’ lath boards and we wanted longer pieces. The Island Cedar Mill in the Valley had bundles of thin boards which were cutoffs from their fencing.

We milled these down to the strip we needed and saved a lot of money too.

The first pieces in place. It was great to start getting a sense of the walls.

Since grading and putting down gravel on the steep part of our driveway 3 years ago, we have done little maintenance on it. Our driveway has gotten rather overgrown with Alder saplings and Scotch Broom. This has not been a problem for our vehicles going up and down the driveway but the big cement truck will soon need to navigate the hill. We spent a whole day clearing the brush on the upslope side of the driveway. We decided to leave the brush on the downslope side to encourage the drivers to hug the inside track, keeping them away from the edge.

Once again Dozy showed off how useful he is by acting as a big powered rake

One of the challenges we will be facing when we go to “shoot” the concrete on to the shell, is the limited access on the Southeast and Southwest sides. We will have to put up scaffolding for the shotcrete applicator to be able to reach the upper parts of the shell. This weekend we worked on two decks that will provide a stable platform for the scaffolding. Also, by raising the deck, the shotcrete operator will be able to “reach” higher on the first run of concrete than if he were standing on the ground. {about 18” lower)

Here is an interesting view of the Southwest corner. All the timbers we used were from the trees milled on our property. It was nice that we didn’t have to buy any materials for these decks especially since they will be torn down afterwards. We worked until 9pm on July 4th and were too tired to go watch the fireworks in Newport. But we did listen to the “1812 Overture”.